Harvesting discourse strategies for rapid prototyping of tailored information delivery systems

In the process of designing tailored information delivery systems based on natural language generation technology, linguistic resources need to be developed. One of such resources is a set of discourse strategies, the abstract structures that specify how to construct a coherent text to achieve a specific communicative goal. Discourse strategies, however, prove to be difficult to develop, in part due to their abstractness. In this paper, we describe a graphical tool which allows users to annotate documents to indicate its various elements and how they relate to each other. The annotations can then be used to generate a first draft of the discourse strategies automatically. The tool is presented in the context of the Myriad delivery platform which aims at facilitating the rapid development of tailored information delivery systems.